Green Statement On GE Inquiry Application

Application for Interested Person Status at the Royal
Commission on Genetic Modification

Green Party of Aotearoa
Inc

Statement by Jeanette Fitzsimons, Co-leader, 10 August
2000

The Green Party is an incorporated society with a
nation wide membership of 2,535 persons. It took its present
form and name in 1990 when Values, the Green Party of
Aotearoa (formed 1972) merged with a number of locally
focussed green groups. Throughout that 28 year period our
members have engaged in policy debate and local action for
social change to further the principles in our charter,
which are similar to those held by more than 100 green
parties around the world. Seven of our members have been
elected to Parliament, but for our members being a Green is
more about a way of life than being an electoral machine for
parliamentarians. I am one of the two elected co-leaders of
the party and it is in that capacity, representing our
members, rather than as a parliamentarian, that I speak to
you today.

In asking that the Green Party be granted
interested person status, may I begin by thanking all four
of you for your commitment to NZ's future in taking on this
demanding task. I have spent a significant part of my life
in the last 3 years finding out and talking about genetic
engineering and I know it is hugely complex.

Genetic
engineering is a difficult topic because it is based in a
scientific world where people are trained to work inside
boxes, but it raises many questions which cannot be answered
from inside a box. Questions like what is life and do we
have the right to alter it? Questions of risk and who should
pay if things go wrong? And questions of rights - the right
of consumers to know what they are eating and the right of
scientists to follow new knowledge.

They are questions of
ethics, values, public policy, economics, as well as of
science. People working in the field of genetic engineering
cannot help the commission on those non-scientific questions
any more than the public at large. On social values, no-one
has an interest greater than anyone else, and there are no
experts, but these issues must not be excluded because
no-one wishing to address them has status before the
Commission.

The Green Party has struggled since it was
founded with questions like these, which are raised when one
must determine public policy in the absence of scientific
certainty. We were deeply involved with similar questions
raised in the seventies about whether NZ should adopt
nuclear power. They also occur in decisions about the
management of highly hazardous substances.

One of our
four founding principles is ecological wisdom. We know that
all life and ecosystems are interconnected, that our lives,
our economy and our emotional and mental wellbeing depend
ultimately on maintaining the health of the natural world.
This is often in conflict with the reductionist view of the
world adopted by some branches of science which attempts to
explain nature by looking at smaller and smaller
disconnected parts. Ecology is about relationships, and we
do not believe you can understand a person or a plant by
describing its individual genes.

The Green Party has
applied for interested person status because we have a
responsibility to our members to represent their views as
effectively as possible to the Commission. Those members are
not the general public - but a group of people who have
committed to working together to represent green
philosophies in their families and communities, as well as
in politics.

Green philosophies are not held by the whole
of the public, and those who do hold them therefore have an
interest apart from other interests which they may hold in
common with the public. I believe effective participation
requires the presentation of an oral submission to the
commission on behalf of all our members, and the opportunity
to question other submitters on their behalf, at the
discretion of the Commission of course.

Many of our
members earn their living from organic food production, and
believe that commercial release of genetically modified
organisms could threaten their livelihood. Many of those
2,500 members, especially the large numbers of new members
who joined in the past year, became members because of our
stance against the commercial release of GMOs. Our Safe Food
policy - ratified by our members - requires the party to
work towards a New Zealand with no field testing or
production of any genetically modified food, and towards the
goal of being an organic nation by 2020.

Our Maori arm,
Te Roopu Pounamu, has a specific interest in the ethical,
cultural and spiritual implications of genetic engineering,
based on tikanga and the partnership required by the Treaty
of Waitangi as well as on Green philosophy.

It has been
suggested that the Green Party should be excluded as an
interested person because we are represented in Parliament.
My response is that we went into Parliament so that we would
have another place to raise the Green voice - Green politics
have always been more about what's happening on the street
than in Parliament. And there is nothing in the legislation
that prevents a political party from gaining interested
person status.

Our desire to protect the ecological
systems we all depend on has always, and will always, come
first. And in fact it is our very desire to contribute to
the strategic direction of New Zealand in issues such as
genetic engineering that took us into politics in the first
place. We care far too deeply about those issues to have any
interest in abusing your processes for political purposes or
wasting your time.

Our concern about genetic engineering
addresses both parts of the warrant you are acting under -
the strategic options and the best regulatory, legislative,
policy and institutional framework for New Zealand. Our
deepest concern is over the release of genetically modified
crops and animals into the environment, because of the
unpredictable behaviour of these organisms in sensitive
ecological systems.

In 1977 I took part in hearings of the
Royal Commission on Nuclear Power chaired by Sir Thaddeus
McCarthy. This was a subject where feelings ran as high as
they do on genetic engineering, and there was conflict
between those whose careers were involved in nuclear
technology and those who were concerned about safety and
NZ's strategic options. I was deeply impressed with this
forum as a place where ordinary citizens could express their
views on a matter of major public policy, and which allowed
both rigorous testing of the evidence and simple statements
of values. There were no parties, and no interested persons.
Sir Thaddeus states in his report

This experience led me
to advocate for the creation of a royal commission as the
best forum I could find to have highly contentious issues
fully and freely debated. I believe I was the first person
to publicly raise the idea of public examination of the
issue through a Royal Commission of Inquiry, and a petition
in my name requesting a Royal Commission collected over
92,000 signatures during 1999.

I was aware of section
4(a) of the Commissions of Inquiry Act 1908 when I launched
my petition but assumed that as it had not constrained Sir
Thaddeus it must be more relevant to inquiries into specific
events or wrongdoings where interests different from the
public do exist. Examples would be the Winebox or Erebus
inquiries.

I respectfully suggest to you that any person
who has taken the trouble to write an individual submission
in their own words, to watch the media closely enough to
find out the process to apply for standing, to make written
application and even turn up to argue their case, clearly
has an interest greater than the public at large, who have
not done this, and should be given the right to present
their case at a hearing.

I take from your public
statements that you are very concerned about the short time
available to complete your report and see this as an
absolute deadline which reduces your ability to hear people
the statute does not oblige you to hear. While the matter is
urgent, the Minister has also stated that if more time is
needed it can be granted and I believe this would be
preferable to excluding members of the public who genuinely
wish to be heard. I doubt many of them would wish to cross
examine, and in any case this right is at your discretion as
chair.

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